I bought this book with a Christmas present book-token back in 1989 along with, for the record, and not that anyone really cares, The Wasp Factory and A History Of The World In Ten And A Half Chapters. Those I read, but this resisted all efforts to get past the first few pages. I found myself intimidated and unprepared for the density, the language and the lives it portrayed. My ambitions to challenge myself with more literary fiction were always slow and intermittent and subject to my own desire for mysteries and thrills that generated excitement and suspense rather than the mysteries of time and death and the thrills of family life.

And so, finally, I pick it up more than twenty years later and barely manage to put it down until the final tragic transcendence. (I'm trying to write this while my three year old son is bombarding me with names of animals, repeating them until I make the appropriate noises. Occasionally he'll throw in the odd bridge or rug or cobweb to really stump me.) The novel launches into the story of the Buendias family and the remote town of Macondo in the jungles of South America (jelly fish? what sound does a flippin' jellyfish make?) and in a torrent of language and characters and incidents charts the course of the family and the town from the early years of wonders and magic when death could not find Macondo to the tawdry, lethargic squalor of its final days. Yet it is meticulously paced and expertly orchestrated so the larger than life characters (what the heck is a swombord?) that stride through these pages from their youthful vitality to their elderly senescence, if they make it that far, and the development of the town, which seems to encapsulate all of South American history, are woven together in a dense, dreamlike epic that never seems to pause for breath but never seems to rush, never seems breathless or clumsy.

Full of a sort of profound, energetic wisdom that knows all lives are circumscribed by death, and so too are families and towns and countries (dinosaur! Lion! Tiger! My throat hurts!) and that with old age comes decrepitude and the subtle traps of memory and nostalgia, Marquez is remorseless in his portrayal of human decline but does so with compassion and insight and humour. I think in 1989 I would not have been ready for this. I think even if I had finished it, I would not have had even a glimmer of understanding or appreciation for the achievement it is. But I'm glad I got it, and glad I carried it with me all these years.

(Motorbike!)